# cViL: Cross-Lingual Training of Vision-Language Models using Knowledge Distillation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.03354 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.03354/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in VLM benchmarks and visual reasoning, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models.
- Builds on 36 of its 50 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Jun 2022.

## Placed in

- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [VLM benchmarks and visual reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/vlm-benchmarks-and-visual-reasoning/)
- Knowledge distillation / [Multimodal distillation](https://mlsanity.com/distill/multimodal-distillation/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 36)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [Unsupervised Cross-lingual Representation Learning at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02116/) (2019)
- [Visual Genome: Connecting Language and Vision Using Crowdsourced Dense Image Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.07332/) (2016)
- [Making the V in VQA Matter: Elevating the Role of Image Understanding in Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00837/) (2016)
- [VQA: Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.00468/) (2015)
- [ViLBERT: Pretraining Task-Agnostic Visiolinguistic Representations for Vision-and-Language Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.02265/) (2019)
- [Knowledge Distillation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.05525/) (2020)
- [LXMERT: Learning Cross-Modality Encoder Representations from Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07490/) (2019)
- [CLEVR: A Diagnostic Dataset for Compositional Language and Elementary Visual Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.06890/) (2016)
- [Bottom-Up and Top-Down Attention for Image Captioning and Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.07998/) (2017)
- [VisualBERT: A Simple and Performant Baseline for Vision and Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.03557/) (2019)
- [Oscar: Object-Semantics Aligned Pre-training for Vision-Language Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.06165/) (2020)
- [TinyBERT: Distilling BERT for Natural Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.10351/) (2019)
- [Revisiting Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data in Deep Learning Era](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.02968/) (2017)
- [Making Monolingual Sentence Embeddings Multilingual using Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.09813/) (2020)
- [Patient Knowledge Distillation for BERT Model Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.09355/) (2019)
- [Unified Vision-Language Pre-Training for Image Captioning and VQA](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.11059/) (2019)
- [Unicoder-VL: A Universal Encoder for Vision and Language by Cross-modal Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.06066/) (2019)
- [Bilinear Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.07932/) (2018)
- [Transformers as Soft Reasoners over Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05867/) (2020)
- [Word Alignment by Fine-tuning Embeddings on Parallel Corpora](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.08231/) (2021)
- [FVQA: Fact-based Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.05433/) (2016)
- [VinVL: Revisiting Visual Representations in Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00529/) (2021)
- [Are You Talking to a Machine? Dataset and Methods for Multilingual Image Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.05612/) (2015)
- [UC2: Universal Cross-lingual Cross-modal Vision-and-Language Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00332/) (2021)
- [Code-switching pre-training for neural machine translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.08088/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [C2KD: Cross-Lingual Cross-Modal Knowledge Distillation for Multilingual Text-Video Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03625/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Vision-and-language tasks are gaining popularity in the research community, but the focus is still mainly on English. We propose a pipeline that utilizes English-only vision-language models to train a monolingual model for a target language. We propose to extend OSCAR+, a model which leverages object tags as anchor points for learning image-text alignments, to train on visual question answering datasets in different languages. We propose a novel approach to knowledge distillation to train the model in other languages using parallel sentences. Compared to other models that use the target language in the pretraining corpora, we can leverage an existing English model to transfer the knowledge to the target language using significantly lesser resources. We also release a large-scale visual question answering dataset in Japanese and Hindi language. Though we restrict our work to visual question answering, our model can be extended to any sequence-level classification task, and it can be extended to other languages as well. This paper focuses on two languages for the visual question answering task - Japanese and Hindi. Our pipeline outperforms the current state-of-the-art models by a relative increase of 4.4% and 13.4% respectively in accuracy.